I was also thinking in these terms. The reality is there is virtually no possibility of starting a startup, getting VC money and making a buck without connections in your customers or investors. This is especially true with VCs.
Kind of disappoints the romantic story but it is what it is
Isn’t “connections” just another word for “networking”? If I’m an investor I want a warm introduction. There are enough scammers and fraudsters out there that a basic filter on “who can vouch for you” is important. Furthermore I like entrepreneurs that had a history in industry, working for other successful people and orgs, before they strike out on their own. That’s my personal preference. And it’s through that history that they make the connections and have people vouch for them.
It’s not some injustice that private firms raise money and then direct it to who they want. That’s just a mechanism for reducing risk in a game where everything is extraordinarily risky.
> virtually no possibility of starting a startup ... without connections in your customers or investors.
I feel this frustration is strongest with enterprise software which is usually the most capital intensive to build and requires a lot of trust to sell.
The number of people who get to make decisions about, for example, data warehousing services is already pretty small and the subset of those willing to be somebody's first customer is even smaller.
However, there are plenty of other startup opportunities outside of that space. Consumers, media people and developers are generally easier to chat with than CIOs and still need software to do what they want to do.
Kind of disappoints the romantic story but it is what it is